Emilie Veltiere

Emilie Veltiere approached Long Stair with a story of defecting from the French programme. She was discovered unarmed and alone well away from the firebase at Landing Three by a group of DOGs out on assignment. After working for a short time with Long Stair, she left the orginization, taking some of its technology back topside. She was pursued for five months across much of the world before she was written off as too costly to chase any longer, especially considering where she turned up.

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Emilie Veltiere claimed to have been a graduate student who was pressganged into working for AUER, the French Basement programme. There, she worked for a little over a year in the subterrainean city of Bastille, which served as the central hub of all French and EU operations in Dungeon, as well as the largest man-made structure incorporated into Dungeon. While she was working for the French, though, they began to treat her poorly and with suspicion. When Veltiere began to fear for her own safety and life, she escaped into Dungeon and spent three days wandering alone trying to find a way back to the Surface.

When Emilie Veltiere was discovered off of Landing Three, she was quickly brought in for questioning. The sum of her stated desires was to get back to her family in Quebec, but former Vice-President Richard Cheney signed an executive order preventing her release from the Long Stair program. With only a few personnel aware of this, she was again pressganged into service, this time for Long Stair. She first worked as a Xenobiologist, trying to create some sense of the biological chain. In order to prove her theories, though, she was sent out with DOG units. This proved to be uninformed. When she was out with the DOGs, tragedy constantly befell them. It was never proven that she had something to do with the traps and pitfalls and cave-ins which cost the lives of quite a few of those who served as her keepers, but she always knew just where to be in order to not be injured. She begged to be released from this duty, but the General overseeing her case constantly denied all exodus from Dungeon. Finally, with every other recourse depleted, Emilie somehow broke into a heavily locked Xenotechnology stockpile on Landing Three, took several objects of use known and unknown, and vanished from Long Stair entirely.

The day Veltiere escaped, the General overseeing her confinement was found dead in his office. A taskforce of DOD, NSA and DHS agents was quickly assembled to capture Veltiere and return her to American soil. The group tracked her popping up throughout South America for several weeks, but by the time the taskforce had zeroed in on her, she had vanished. The agents had discovered the location of the Brazilian trapdoor, however, which lead to the assumption that she had been back into Dungeon. Why she had gone there remains unknown. In order to try to get ahead of Veltiere, an agent was sent to speak with her parents in Quebec. Oddly, the parents denied ever having a daughter named Emilie, though they did have a son who was still working in France. It came to light that the Veltiere son had himself been brought in to work in Bastille, where he engaged in fraternization with a type of Basement Dweller known colloquially as a Halfling. The result of that liason was called Emilie, and raised in Bastille. She reached physical maturity at the age of four years, and showed a large amount of genetic memory from both her mother and father, however, she did not realize that the memories she had were not her own. Thus, she believed that she had been pressganged into work for AUER, a mash-up of the histories of both her parents, and that all those around her treated her with suspicion, which they did, because she was a True Hybrid. With her True Hybrid status confirmed, much that was known about her came into focus. She survived unarmed in Dungeon for days because she had the genetic memories which allowed her to travel the safest routes at the safest times, and she could locate the trapfalls, cave-ins, and devices for much the same reason. Why her nature was kept from her remains part of a Cheney classified document.

Veltiere's racial ability to escape captivity and pursuit seemed to serve her in good stead, because for months, the taskforce sent to retrieve her always arrived several hours after she'd left a place. The closest the taskforce came was when they discovered the existence of the Brazilian trap door, mere minutes after Veltiere had been seen entering the complex. Several hours later, miles away, one of the xenotech objects which Veltiere had absconded with was discovered, containing the damaged head of a brain flenzer and accompanied by a note from the woman telling the taskforce to stop following her, because she had not even begun to run. Flying in the face of presidential directives, LONG STAIR issued an edict to cease all pursuit of Veltiere. When Cheney stressed the urgency of her recapture, Long Stair ignored him. Cheney then resorted to threats of termination and court martial, one Lt. Martinet was quoted as saying "Fine. Levinworth beats the hell out of what we have here." Unable to find a break in the unified front of Long Stair, Cheney backed down. With the change of administrations, Veltiere has been completely lost in the bureaucratic shuffle.

The official word on Veltiere is that, despite her non-terrestrial origin, she is considered non-dangerous. Contact is to be avoided, since she had a number of objects of unknown function, and is herself unpredictable. Any attempt at recapture is out of the question.